From: Gabo3@aol.com
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 1995 14:36:45 -0400
New York Newsday, Dec. 8, 1994
KILLING US SOFTLY WITH HIS CONTRACT
By Gabriel Rotello
New York - Newt Gingrich, the openly divorced, openly remarried pillar of
traditional families and former pot smoking scourge of permissive
McGoverniks, is quite a piece of work. He certainly has some members of the
media flummoxed. How else to explain recent news reports that a crusading hypo
crite of his skill and distinction might not be the Neanderthal on gay rights
we expected?
We have read, for example, that he has a lesbian half sister and gets along
with her famously. We have heard that he recently told an interviewer that
"on most days the vast majority of practicing homosexuals are good citizens."
We have read that he wants to include gays in the Republican effort to "renew
American civilization," and that he opposes "sex police in the YMCA
bathroom," whatever that means.
But the man-bites-dog quality of these kinder, gentler pronouncements should
not obscure the soon to be speaker's actual gay agenda. Gingrich uttered the
above before his Contract With America made him the most successful
conservative since Genghis Khan. And now that he's definitely in, gays are
definitely out.
Among his more ominous pronouncements are those on gay employment and gay mar
riage. Although the presumptive speaker said that he wants to "dramatically
improve the quality of life, the economic opportunity" of all Americans, he
had very different things to say about the economic opportunities of lesbian
and gay Americans. Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether he thought that "a
businessman should have the right not to hire a gay person," Gingrich
answered, "Absolutely. Absolutely." He also said that he is "against any law
which gives you a legal status based on your sexual orientation." Workers
fired from companies like Cracker Barrel because they were lesbian or gay
might be forgiven for wondering how Gingrich's position will dramatically
improve their economic lives. But apparently such people are not included in
his expansive vision of "all Americans."
Gingrich, who tried to wrest a divorce settlement from his first wife as she
lay in a hospital bed recovering from a cancer operation (hey, nobody's
perfect), was equally unyielding on the issue of the sanctity of marriage. In
the same interview in which he said that "on most days" gays are good
citizens (Which days? The ones we don't have sex?), Gingrich also said this:
"It is madness to pretend that families are anything other than heterosexual
couples. I think it goes to the core of how civilization functions. Over time
we want to have an explicit bias in favor of heterosexual marriage."
I'm sure that over time Gingrich hopes to enact plenty of explicit biases.
He clearly aspires to be the Sam Walton of the bias business. But while
supporting families is not something I or most people would argue with in
these days of crime and crack and gun toting ten year olds, a particular bias
in favor of heterosexual marriage and against homosexual marriage seemingly
flies in the face of the very family values Gingrich and company espouse.
Gay families have been shown again and again to be exelmplary providers of
the kind of nurturing, stable environments that children need. Evan Wolfson,
a Lambda Legal Defense lawyer fighting for legalized gay marriage, calls it
"absurd to pretend gays are not forming stable families. What Gingrich means
is, he doesn't care what the facts are." Except, perhaps, the political
facts. In the wake of November's Democratic debacle, which pundits
increasingly, and I think excessively, attribute to Clinton's support of gays
in the military, Gingrich is zooming away from his own tepid dalliance with
tolerance at warp speed, and he's the one in the captain's chair.
So forget all those stories about the nice new Newt. And fasten your seat
belts.